Chapter II: Part 2

And so these pleasant saunters that so often ended before a hideous row of red-brick houses, the quiet lanes that terminated abruptly before a vast pile of bricks and boards, created in Machen the beginnings of that doctrine of the strange and terrifying things that lie so close to the surface of the quiet and the commonplace. The hideous face at the window in a story written years later is but a reflection of the sudden apparition of a raw, new suburb at the end of a quiet lane leading north out of London.

For the present these were but things seen and felt, they sank quietly below the surface and floated deep down in the well of the unconscious. Tutoring and Turnham Green and the twisting roads of Notting Hill were sufficient unto the days. The nights in his small room in Clarendon Road were more urgent—more filled with magic. For here there was not the sudden sight of a street hastily hacked into a hillside, nor the mounds and monuments of a cemetery, but great books and greater magic flowing from the majesty of Gothic cathedrals or the Arthurian romances or the Divine Comedy. He read by night, lighting candles when the gas meter clicked off, and passed for a time into the “Middle Ages, walking in the silvery light with the Masters of the Sentences, with the Angelic Doctor, listening to the high interminable argument of the Schools.” Out of these books and studies, and a great deal out of Burton’s _Anatomy of Melancholy_ came a book that was to be called _The Anatomy of Tobacco_.

The book was sent to a publisher who, as it happened, liked it and who was prepared to publish it, after “certain preliminaries” were attended to. These preliminaries entailed a visit to Caerleon and called for another conference in the parlour at the Rectory. The family and the relations, remembering the pamphlet of a few years ago and encouraged by the news that the new book would contain many times more than sixteen pages, attended to the preliminaries.

In due course, in the year 1884, George Redway of London published _The Anatomy of Tobacco_. And a very handsome book it was, in its cream parchment boards and brick-red lettering on the spine. The author of this study of smoking, “Methodized, Divided, and Considered after a New Fashion” was one “Leolinus Silurensis, Professor of Fumical Philosophy in the University of Brentford,” in whom we may recognize our old friend, the former Member of the Hereford Cathedral School.

This is the book Machen calls “The Anatomy of Tankards” in his _Far Off Things_. There you may read the whys and the wherefores of this amazing composition, and the devious means by which Burton and tobacco and divers other curious books entered into its making. So convincing is his account of his investigations and research into the matter of taverns and tankards and such matters that quite a few collectors have spent considerable time, and were prepared to spend considerable sums, to acquire a copy of _The Anatomy of Tankards_. Meanwhile, Machen had quitted the six-by-ten room in the Clarendon Road and returned to Caerleon and a normal diet. Throughout the winter of 1884 he had worked on the proofs of the _Anatomy_ and then upon an assignment from Redway for another book. This was a translation of the _Heptameron_ of Marguerite of Navarre. Machen blithely undertook the task, despite his own sworn statement that upon leaving Hereford School he could not have conjugated the simplest, and most popular, of French verbs.

The merrie and delightsome tales of the French Marguerite occupied him through winter and spring in Gwent. Once more he walked in the deep lanes about Caerleon and alternately missed London and revelled in the luxury of not being in Clarendon Road. By the time June came to Caerleon he had sent off the last batch of his translation and Redway had written him and offered him a job. It did not seem too hard a thing to return to Clarendon Road with a job, a real one, in the City. He was to catalogue books—and such books! There were books on Alchemy and Magic, on Mysteries and Ancient Worship, on the occult sciences and Rosicrucians and all sorts of wonderful and baleful and mystic and incredible matters.

Machen became the cataloguer of these curious volumes—and he came very close to being that wonderful phenomena of the twentieth century: a publisher’s advertising man! As a matter of fact, Machen did achieve something few, if any, publisher’s advertising men have accomplished—either before or since. Two of his catalogues have become highly prized collector’s items. They were published in 1887 and 1888 respectively.

Working in a book-filled garret in Catherine Street, Machen produced one catalogue which pops up from time to time in Machen bibliographies: _The Literature of Occultism and Archeology_. Then it occurred to him to paraphrase a chapter in _Don Quixote_, the one in which the Curate and the Barber examine the Knight’s library. This chapter was written in a manner calculated to entice the wary or unwary book collector into buying the books discussed. The catalogue was issued under the title _A Chapter from the Book Called The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha_. The other catalogue, issued in the following year, bore the title _Thesaurus Incantatus, The Enchanted Treasure or, The Spagyric Quest of Beroaldus Cosmopolita_.

It will do little good to look for copies of these catalogues. Vincent Starret, the fortunate possessor of at least one of them, in his collection of Machen’s tales, _The Shining Pyramid_ (Covici-Fried, Chicago, 1923) has included two pieces called _The Priest and the Barber_ and _The Spagyric Quest of Beroaldus Cosmopolita_. These are taken, of course, from the catalogues in question. As to whether you will find the Starret volumes readily available—well, they are worth the search.

Well then, here was Machen in a hot-bed of the occult and the devilish, surrounded by books of all sorts, especially the strange, the weird and the curious. His room in the Clarendon Road held as many books as it could accommodate along with its occupant—the overflow was stacked between the rungs of a ladder on the landing outside. He was busy with notebooks once more, and writing furiously as ever—but in despair rather than the fine frenzy and high spirits of a few years before. For now he was deep in Rabelais and Balzac—and these books cast a spell upon him. They were warm, glowing books in which life was full and rich and lusty—there were great eaters and drinkers and lovers in those days. They offered too great a contrast to the cold, lonely room in Clarendon Road and the diet of tea, tobacco and bread.

Machen was under the spell of a landscape bathed in a warm sun, with ruins standing close to roads, and wine flowing from vineyard to bottle to parched throats all within a few yards of enchanted space. This was a contrast indeed to the deep lanes of Gwent, the lonely ruins that stood in the shade and shadow of great hills and forests, and although Machen had spoken glowingly of the greenish-yellow cider of that land, still, he rather favored, in his mind at least, the wines of Touraine.

By night there was this magic of old books and by day there were the old books of magic, for the garret in Catherine Street was crowded with old and odd books of every sort, a collection that “represented that inclination of the human mind which may be a survival from the rites of the black swamp and the cave.” These studies did induce a frame of mind that might tend toward the strange and unusual. Living in this strange mixture of a glowing, gargantuan landscape and the dark labyrinths of the mediaeval mind, Machen tried, and sometimes desperately tried, to write.

“A man has no business to write,” said Machen many years later, “unless he has something in his heart, which, he feels cries out to be expressed.” And he had nothing to say—had only the urge to write, the vice of writing for writing’s sake—_cacoethes scribendi_—he called it! But then Machen has had time to reconsider his pronouncement of 1923, and to revise his opinion regarding men who wrote—and why they write.

In a “London Letter” to the _New York Times Book Section_, Herbert W. Horwill wrote, in September 1935: “A curious literary problem is posed by that veteran author, Arthur Machen, in John o’ London’s Weekly. Imagine a man marooned on a desert island, and certain that he would remain there for the rest of his life. Imagine, moreover, that he possessed the literary faculty, and had salvaged pens, ink and paper from the wreck or else had devised home-made substitutes for them. Would such a man write, knowing that whatever he wrote would never be seen by any eye but his own?

“Mr. Machen tells us that he once heard this question discussed among a group of friends. Some answered yes and some no, and, when pipes were knocked out for the night, the problem was no nearer solution, though, to the best of his recollection, the ayes were in the majority. He voted with them himself, and, after further reflection, he still believes he was right. The hypothetical Crusoe might have no better implements available than quills of parrots’ feathers, paper made out of the bark of the guru tree and ink obtained by macerating the root of a certain plant. But, granted his possession of the literary faculty, he would possess also the literary impulse. He would write because he liked writing, apart from whatever fate might be in store for the thing written. The true spring of imaginative literature, Mr. Machen reminds us, is the delight of the creator in creation.”

In the desert island of Clarendon Road, all through the summer of 1885, Machen wrote. He wrote because he had to, because he was under the spell of a master of gargantuan languages, because he was enamoured of the sound of words and because he had an ear for the rich and rolling phrase. And, of course, he wrote because he had the literary impulse. The pound a week he was paid by Redway could not afford him the rich living, the pleasures of Touraine. But then, after despair and after much almost pointless scribbling, he came at last upon the idea for the Great Romance.

It was to be a book in which Rabelais and Gwent were mingled ... and thus began the “History of the Nine Joyous Journeys ... in which were contained the amorous inventions and fanciful tales of Master Gervase Perrot, Gent.” Machen had prepared for this great undertaking by purchasing his ruled quarto paper, his pen points and his penholders. Quite possibly he envisioned a plaque on the door of his little cell at 23 Clarendon Road, announcing that Here Had the Great Romance been Written! There was, however, this difficulty—the vision of the great romance declined to be more specific. There were no hints as to plot, no guidance as to characters. He began, at any rate, a Prologue, written in a flowing and flowery 17th Century manner.

But now his cataloguing in Catherine Street had come to an end, and with it his pound or thereabouts per week. Nevertheless, he wrote on, even though he knew that his composition of the Great Romance might be abruptly terminated some three or four days in the future. Then, presumably, he would return to Caerleon, in all probability on foot. As it happened, he returned hurriedly by train. Just as he had come to the end of his tea and tobacco and rent money, he had word that his mother was dying. Aunt Maria thoughtfully sent his fare with the summons.

Later, he returned to the “great romance,” writing once more in the familiar room in the rectory where the fire burned and the winds howled down from Twyn Barlwyn and tossed the branches and beat upon the door. He wrote late into the morning, long after his father had knocked out his last pipe and gone upstairs. So passed the winter of 1885. Through the days he walked in the lovely Gwentian hills and looked down upon the white farm houses standing in the midst of encircling trees. At night he worked in that room where he had, as a boy, first read de Quincy and Scott and the other writers who had helped to bring about the “renascence of wonder.” And in the following year he was alone. His father died that spring.

This was the John Edward Jones whose homecoming from Jesus College, Oxford, is described in the opening pages of _Things Near and Far_. Now Machen was more truly alone than ever. His father had been to him a good companion in his earliest rambles about the countryside. It had been his father’s hope that Arthur might one day return to Gwent to live, buy a small newspaper and settle down to a quiet career in country journalism.

There were certain inheritances that might help, when they came through. For Machen’s father seldom thought of the good these inheritances would do for him in his struggle to make ends meet at Llanddewi Rectory. But now he had gone and then, ironically, the long-lived Scottish relations went too, and the Scottish lawyers began to look through family Bibles for the next of kin.

Through these and other circumstances Machen at length came into money—smallish amounts which, shrewdly invested or even conservatively invested, might have stretched themselves out for a score or more years. This economic policy did not suggest itself or, if it did, was quietly ignored. The simple expedient of living modestly and comfortably, and dipping into a box for coins, when coins were required, seemed much the better plan.

In 1887 Machen returned to London, to live in Bedford Place, and to arrange for the publication of the Great Romance, now called _The Chronicle of Clemendy_. This was accomplished, with perhaps a deeper plunge into the box of coins, and the book was published that year. It was printed at Carbonnek, “for the society of Pantagruelists.” And it did, apparently, quite well. The nine joyous journeys and the merry monks of Abergavenny pleased Machen and his fellow Pantagruelists—which, in the year 1888 or 1948, is almost as much as can be asked of any book.

_Chapter Two_

THE LONDON ADVENTURE

1

In the late 1880’s Arthur Machen had, as he said, “Rabelais on the brain.” He had been for some years under the spell of the gargantuan tales and of Balzac’s _Contes Drolatiques_—and perhaps even more under the spell, literarily if not literally, of the Holy Bottle and the magic of Touraine and whatever it is about the land of France that so beguiles the young of the Anglo-Saxon peoples.

It was under the Rabelaisian influence that Machen had written his “great Romance,” _The Chronicle of Clemendy_, and made his translation of the _Heptameron_. And finally he had undertaken to translate and publish an even more difficult and bizarre book—_Le Moyen de Parvenir_ by Beroalde de Verville.

This book, rather highly prized by collectors of at least two sorts, is incredibly dull. No fault of Machen’s certainly, although he might have permitted it to remain untranslated. Still, he was at the stage and of an age when this sort of thing had an appeal. And so he translated and published it in not one, but two editions. There was a large paper edition and an “ordinary” edition—both preceded by a very small edition (four copies) of a portion of the book under the title _The Way to Attain_.

Now of course every Machen bibliography lists this title, and many a Machenite has wished he might obtain a copy. Actually, it is one of the least important of Machen’s works. For this is merely a portion of _Le Moyen de Parvenir_—and very probably not an important part at that. Bibliographers, bibliophiles and bibliomaniacs are at liberty to go quietly mad in their quest for this queer little item. For queer it is—Machen himself cannot quite explain its existence. The four copies were issued in 1889, presumably by the Dryden Press who were to publish the complete work. A dispute over something or other arose and the project was dropped—at least by the Dryden Press. All four copies, apparently, are in the safe-keeping of Danielson, or they were at one time.

The other two editions were privately printed at Carbonnek in 1890 under the title of _Fantastic Tales_. There have been other editions, de luxe if not luxurious, for what is sometimes known as “the trade.” It may be assumed that the writer holds no very high opinion of this work. But then neither does Machen. He has described the book as being somewhat like a cathedral constructed entirely of gargoyles—as plain a warning as any ever given by an author regarding one of his works.

This fantastic collection of “discourses ... on Reformation politics ... many tales, some pointless, a few amusing” while it may provide puzzles, pleasure and profit for bibliophiles, is important only in that it marks the finish of the Rabelaisian influence upon Machen. Not that this influence was ever “Rabelaisian” in the usual sense ... it was rather like that of various French poets and novelists of several generations over still other generations of English and American writers. During certain periods our younger writers and “intellectuals” would have Verlaine on the brain, or Baudelaire in their bonnets, but eventually they would go back to writing stark novels about Sussex or Sauk Center, or Wales or Wisconsin or the moors of the Missouri.

The extent of this enthusiasm and the depth of this influence may be estimated from the following rhapsody delivered by Ambrose Meyrick in _The Secret Glory_. “Let me celebrate, above all, the little red wine. Not in any mortal vineyard did its father grape ripen; it was not nourished by the warmth of the visible sun, nor were the rains that made it swell common waters from the skies above us. Not even in the Chinonnais, earth sacred though that be, was the press made that caused its juices to be poured into the _cuve_, nor was the humming of its fermentation heard in any of the good cellars of the lower Touraine. But in that region which Keats celebrates when he sings the ‘Mermaid Tavern’ was this juice engendered—the vineyard lay low down in the south, among the starry plains where is the _Terra Turonensis Celestis_, that unimaginable country which Rabelais beheld in his vision where mighty Gargantua drinks from inexhaustible vats eternally, where Pantagruel is athirst for evermore, though he be satisfied continually. There, in the land of the Crowned Immortal Tosspots was that wine of ours vintaged, red with the rays of the Dog-star, made magical by the influence of Venus, fertilised by the happy aspect of Mercury. O rare, super-abundant and most excellent juice, fruit of all fortunate stars, by thee were we translated, exalted into the fellowship of that Tavern of which the old poet writes: _Mihi est propositum in Taberna mori!_”

Well, it was quite a thing while it lasted ... but the Rabelaisian vein petered out and Machen began to perceive that he was of Caerleon-on-Usk and not a townsman of Tours or a citizen of Chinon, and that the old grey manor-houses and the white farms of Gwent had their beauty and significance, though they were not castles in Touraine.

Meanwhile he was back at his old trade of cataloguing. He had switched employers for, when York Street would yield little more than a pound a week, Leicester Square would give thirty shillings. So back he went to cataloguing ancient books. Not that he was much good at it, nor that he preferred it above all other forms of employment. As a matter of fact he rather disapproved of the whole business and issued what almost amounts to a Manifesto to Collectors: “I don’t care two-pence,” he wrote, “whether a book is in the first edition or in the tenth; nay, if the tenth is the best edition, I would rather have it ... the only question being: is the book worth reading or not?”

Nevertheless, cataloguing seems to have been a rather flourishing trade at the time, and a profitable practice—for the publisher at any rate. For this was a remarkably literate era, and publishers pandered profitably to the popular taste ... they were busily at work discovering rare books, improving some with plates borrowed from others, issuing new and enlarged editions at the drop of a folio, and discovering the pleasures and profits to be derived from making translations—particularly from the French. In the same building occupied by Machen’s employers were the offices of Vizatelly, the publisher who was even then bringing out translations of Zola’s works. At about the same time Machen was working there, Havelock Ellis was editing the Mermaid Tavern Series of Elizabethan Dramatists for Vizatelly. Ellis notes in his _Autobiography_ that he was paid the sum of three guineas per volume—an amount he considered rather small. This may indeed have been a small amount—but he had a better deal of it than Machen who was asked, at about this time, to do a translation of the memoirs of Casanova.

The manner in which this undertaking came about was rather curious and very casual. One of the Brothers for whom he worked, and whom he does not otherwise identify in _Things Near and Far_, came to him one day with an old volume and asked Machen to translate from the place marked with a slip of paper. Machen set to work and about a year later he completed his translation of the twelve volumes of _Casanova’s Memoirs_. The place marked fell in about the fifth volume, and Machen simply translated through to the twelfth, began again at the first and worked through to the place in the fifth volume—which was “where he came in” as one says at the movies.

This monumental work, and the best translation to date of the _Memoirs_, was thrown in, as it were, with the cataloguing at thirty shillings a week. Machen simply remarks that he believes the cost to the firm to have been “strictly moderate.” Much more moderate than the three guineas per volume paid to Ellis for his editing. However, Machen was eventually offered an opportunity of profiting from his work. A few years later when the translation was about to be published, Machen was granted the privilege of investing a thousand pounds in the venture. One of the Brothers suggested that, as he was now an _interested_ party, he might wish to revise the manuscript.

Of course publishing was not quite the same game it is today ... there were publishers then who were, if not actually unscrupulous, a trifle careless in their accounting and possibly slightly unethical. Vizatelly was prosecuted and jailed as a result of his translations of Zola. Machen has remarked upon the irony of the situation—for even while Vizatelly was in jail, charged with circulating obscene literature, Zola was being well received on his trip through England. When Vizatelly died shortly thereafter the Mermaid Tavern series was taken over by another publisher without so much as a by-your-leave. Ellis’ name was removed from the volumes, and that, apparently, settled that. Ellis treated the affair with a silence he knew would not be taken as a sign of contempt. One gathers that publishers in those days were not very thin-skinned. However, in his autobiographical sketches describing these events, Machen offers not the slightest criticism of the Brothers but he did, shortly thereafter, quit the publishing business.

2

For almost a decade Machen had been in London, and for most of that time he had been writing. But he had written rather imitatively; he had, as he says, “been wearing costume in literature. The rich, figured English of the earlier 17th Century had a peculiar attraction....” Whether this was unnatural affectation or natural affinity, he wrote in this fashion—essays, verse, tales, epistols dedicatory. He even kept, for many years, a diary written in this manner. _The Anatomy of Tobacco_ was an “exercise in the antique,” the _Chronicle_ tried to be mediaeval, _Le Moyen_ was in the ancient mode, the _Heptameron_ a mere finger-exercise in the composition of a period piece. At this point Machen decided to write in the modern manner.

In 1890 Machen began to make an approach to journalism. His Welsh relations were probably gratified when his pieces and stories began to appear in the Globe and the St. James Gazette. He was still a long way from adopting journalism as a profession or career, but he had decided to do some writing in “the modern manner” and the papers seemed to offer an outlet.

Journalism was then, as it is now, a wonderfully agitated world in which editors knew what their readers wanted and were determined to see that they got it—whether they liked it or not. Oddly enough, an editor’s staff never seems to have this happy faculty of knowing what the readers want, but they do know what their editors want—and so everyone is mildly unhappy about it excepting the editors—and it is questionable whether an editor is ever really happy, or ever deserves to be.

At any rate Machen wrote, on an average, about as much drivel as the average journalist must, and about as many silly stories as most journalists have to. Of course it was not as bad as it might have been, or as bad as it became later, for, according to Machen, editors in the 1890’s presumed a certain standard of education and culture in their readers. This tendency has been overcome, however, and along with certain other technical improvements the press as it existed during Machen’s time was much as it is today.

His success at writing for the Globe and an acceptance by the St. James Gazette started him on short stories. These appeared mostly in the Gazette whose rate of payment was commendably higher than the Globe’s. The connection did not last too long for one of the stories created quite a stir.

Reading it now one wonders at that, and when one remembers a few of the tales that were to flourish in the decade to follow, Machen’s little story of _The Double Return_ seems harmless enough. The tale is rather reminiscent of _The Guardsman_—you will remember the success of the Lunts in that play on the stage and on the screen. Machen’s tale lacked the amorousness or even the intent of _The Guardsman_, it merely told of a man returning home after three weeks in the country.

“Back so soon?” asked his wife.

“I’ve been in the country for three weeks,” said he, rather put out.

“I know,” she said, “but you returned last night.”

“Indeed not, I spent last night at Plymouth on my way back from the country,” said the husband.

Whereupon his wife accused him of being playful and showed him his cigarette case he had left behind him when he left the house this very morning. Well, the husband had lost the cigarette case in the country some days before, and he _had_ spent the night in Plymouth on his way back to London, and so he couldn’t have returned on the previous night. There had been a man at his hotel or inn who rather resembled him and so on. The upshot of it all was that shortly thereafter the husband went to America, which seems to have been the thing to do in such cases. A rather harmless little story, not even a boudoir scene or a hint of one. But _The Double Return_ aroused as much interest in the nineties as the most daring double entendre might today.

Oscar Wilde, no amateur at arousing the public, said to Machen, “Are you the author of that story that fluttered the dovecotes? I thought it very good.” Well, flutter the dovecotes it did, and one did not flutter the dovecotes with impunity, at least so far as the St. James Gazette was concerned. Machen no longer appeared in its august pages. This may or may not have caused Machen concern. He was also doing stories for some of the “society” papers and wrote in this same year _The Lost Club_, so very similar to Stevenson’s story of the Suicide Club, _A Wonderful Woman_ and others.

The year 1890 happens to be a year of some significance generally, for it opens the decade of the delicate decadents, sometimes known as the Yellow Book Boys.

Among the many books that have been written about the Eighteen Nineties is a small and, on the whole, less pretentious volume than most. This is Bernard Muddiman’s _Men of the Nineties_. In it one finds this brief mention of Machen: “Arthur Machen, in those days, belonged to the short story writers with Hubert Crackanthorpe, who was the great imaginative prose writer of the group.”

Alas, poor Hubert! Who knows him today as a great imaginative prose writer? Who, for that matter, knows poor Hubert at all, save for those who may look into the bound volumes of the Yellow Book to be found occasionally in the Public Library (under the somewhat bewildering though accurate classification of “Magazines”)?

The 1890’s was perhaps the most widely and well publicized decade in history, surpassing, in this respect at least, the ’Twenties of our own century. The 1890’s spawned geniuses where the 1920’s only discovered genius. The analogy between these decades can be carried to even greater lengths and indeed it will be, in a later chapter, for the ’Twenties also rediscovered Arthur Machen.

But for all poor Muddiman’s eulogy of Hubert in his slender volume eulogizing the men of the Nineties, the late Mr. Crackanthorpe was _not_ the great imaginative prose writer of the group. Nor was the prolific Henry Harland, whose contributions to the Yellow Book were in the New Style—with French phrases popping up half a dozen to the page and French women putting in appearance among the good English spinneys, and representative members of the New Woman being forthright and outspoken for all their “flutter of curls at the brow” and garden hats and “merry peals of laughter.” Mr. Harland sprinkled his prose with French phrases, giving them a naughty air (just as, in the Twenties, French phrases were used to give novels a sophisticated air) and his heroes were made “interesting” rather than solid or adventurous or empire building. They, the “interesting” chaps, thought of women as “handsome” or “good-looking” rather than beautiful or lovely. Such words were reserved for inanimate things—things animal, vegetable or mineral, but never the feminine. They further thought of women in terms of “what a _woman_ she is!” Like that, with an air of invincible surprise. No, it was not Hubert, nor yet Henry, who was the great imaginative prose writer of the group—it was Arthur Machen. But then Muddiman may have been right after all, for Machen was not truly of the group of writers who practiced the purple phrase, who wrote in pastels and who composed pastiches in praise of practically nothing.

It may come as something of a surprise to many admirers of Machen to know that he was a contemporary of the Yellow Book crowd. Perhaps it will come as something of a relief to know that Machen was not a member of the group, despite the fact that his first book of stories appeared in this period, issuing from the Bodley Head with a title page by Beardsley. Machen never wrote for the Yellow Book. But for that matter, neither did Wilde. Still, yellow bookery was rampant at the time and since it is sometimes said that a man is the product of his age, it might be well to skirt along the well travelled path trod by the delicate decadents, their critics and appraisers and appreciators.

Osburt Burdett, Holbrook Jackson, Richard LeGallienne and other more talented and serious students have gone over the period with admirable thoroughness. The magnifying glass has been placed over every one of Beardsley’s drawings and even the most moribund of the minor poets has been the subject of at least one monograph. Still, it will be interesting to review briefly what has been said of the men of the Nineties, if only because it may be applied, with certain changes and reservations, to the Twenties and, for that matter, to the period which we are about to enter. For the birth of the Atomic Age, for all its violent and destructive debut, cannot have been more shocking, in some respects, than the impact of the coterie of the green carnation upon the Victorianism of the Nineties.

The group known as the Yellow Book boys, or the men of the Nineties, or the delicate decadents were, as Donald Davidson has remarked, “time-conscious” to an intense degree. They were nearing the end of a century, just as the men of the Twenties lived through the end of an epoch and the men of the Forties enter a new one. There is still, you see, this strange analogy between the “Tragic Generation” as the men of the Nineties called themselves, and the “Lost Generation” as the men of the Twenties called themselves. Whether or not there will be a continuing analogy between the three decades is an interesting speculation, but quite beyond the scope of this study. Or is it?

The men of the Nineties were time-conscious to an intense degree and they were self-conscious to an even greater degree. Being young men, for one thing, and acutely aware of the Victorianism of their Victorian age for another, and rather preoccupied with the importance of being earnest and alive in the closing years of a century for still another, they were rather more self-conscious than most young men.

Now it is an odd thing, when one considers it, that the young and self-conscious members of the Anglo-Saxon races, in whatever age, discover in themselves a remarkable affinity and a positive predilection for the culture and customs of France. This happens time and again, and whenever it does happen it is accompanied by a profound contempt for the Anglo-Saxonishness of their Anglo-Saxon contemporaries and compatriots. No doubt there are excellent reasons for this. It is a strange thing, but it is by no means unusual, since it has happened with something very much like regularity ever since William the Norman crossed the Channel—and perhaps even before that.

The Saxon nobles who set themselves apart from the peasantry were probably the first to adopt the manners and language of the Norman court. Almost any intrigue current at the time, or for the next few centuries, seemed the more likely to succeed if it acquired a dash of the Gallic. Even in that most English of all English periods, the age of Elizabeth, the young blades and the intellectuals felt the more dashing and, presumably, the more intellectual for a smattering of French oaths and a short time spent in the courts or chateaux of France, or the alleys and marketplaces of Paris.

Well, then, the men of the Nineties acquired their smattering of French and their translations of Baudelaire and Verlaine and felt the better for them ... much as our men of the Twenties rode the cattle-boats to the Left Bank and wrote the “only American literature” of their day. Little magazines sprang up in the Nineties, verse grew steadily more _libre_, and there was little difference, spiritually at any rate, between the Bodley Head in 1890 and the Shakespeare Head in 1920 or thereabouts. Another lost, tragic generation of self-conscious Anglo-Saxons had “found themselves”—and France.

3

To return to the Nineties. There were those, even then, who suspected that something was up in the state of English literature. Grave and scholarly men analyzed the state of affairs and speculated on causes and results. If the young men were pleased with themselves there were others who were not. There was a certain looseness of thinking and of phrasing that was not universally approved. The burden of such critical attitudes is a familiar one—it is the one that attends all new movements in literature, following change as the night follows the day.

The first and best expressed of these critical appraisals appeared in, of all places, the first volume of the _Yellow Book_ itself. Advocating “Reticence in Literature,” Arthur Waugh wrote: “During the last quarter of a century ... the English man of letters has been indulging, with an entirely new freedom, his national birthright of outspokenness, and during the last twelve months there have been no uncertain indications that this freedom of speech is degenerating into license which some of us cannot but view with regret and apprehension.” A familiar note, an old refrain!

“The writers and the critics of contemporary literature have, it would seem, alike lost their heads; they have gone out into the byways and hedges in search of the new thing, and have brought into the study and subjected to the microscope mean objects of the roadside, whose analysis may be of value to science but is absolutely foreign to art.”

Mr. Waugh then proceeds to make the point that every great productive period of literature has been the result of some internal or external revulsion of feeling, some current of ideas. The great periods of productivity had been those when the national mind had been directed to some vast movement of emancipation, the discovery of new countries, the defeat of old enemies, the opening of fresh possibilities. But, Waugh remonstrates, the past quarter of a century had been sterile of important improvements, there had been no new territories and no new knowledge. Because of this sterility the minds of writers had been thrown back upon themselves and the most characteristic literature of the day had become introspective.

“Following one course,” says Waugh, “it has betaken itself to that analytical fiction which we associate primarily with America; following another course, it has sought for subject matter in the discussing of passions and sensations, common, doubtless, to every age of mankind, interesting and necessary, too, in their way, but passions and sensations hitherto disassociated with literature.”

It will be noted that Waugh attributes a certain regrettable trend to American sources, but then he later says that the tendency for literary frankness had its origins in Swinburne. Despite the accuracy of many points made by Waugh, it must be noted that the world in 1890 was not quite the uneventful place it seemed to him. There had been, it is true, no wars of any consequence for a fortnight or two, no Armada threatened, no European paranoiac gazed balefully across the Channel and regicide was, for that moment, happily unthought of. Such things were, so long as Victoria sat on the throne, unthinkable—especially the latter.

But Darwin’s _Origin of the Species_ had been written some years before, and Karl Marx, who also had something of a London adventure, had written a book with the stodgy title _Das Kapital_, and the Webbs and the Socialists and the Fabians were quietly preparing their various ideologies. Things were brewing, even though under the surface, and no one paid them much heed, least of all the “irresponsibles” of the Nineties.

These things meant little to Waugh, apparently, and seemed of no particular consequence. They seemed of even less consequence to the delicate decadents who were staging a well publicized literary rebellion of their own. It is not our intention to go further into the matter nor to list the peculiarities of these practitioners of pastel prose, nor to relate the peccadillos of its precocious and precious poets. We content ourselves with observing that Arthur Machen had little to do with them, either as individuals or as a group.

4

From that day in June 1880 when he first walked in the Strand with his father, Arthur Machen was fascinated by London. He did not always love the city, nor was he ever moved to apostrophise London as young writers have frequently written of Paris. Anyone who reads _Things Near and Far_ and _Far Off Things_ will wonder, perhaps, why he returned to the city time and again, and why he spent so much of his life there. One is appalled by the dismal history of those years, by the portrayal of the lonely days spent in damp basements and musty garrets pouring over old books for the endless catalogues, and by the lonelier nights in that small room in the Clarendon Road. The long walks through obscure quarters of London and the endless explorations of the suburbs were often the last refuge of desperation and depression. The encounters and experiences with publishers and employers were disillusioning enough, the friendlessness of London was an even greater hardship. You will find all of this in these two books of sketches and reminiscences—but they are only incidentally there. For though Machen plainly states his loneliness and relates the hardships and disillusionments he endured, he neither emphasizes nor dramatizes them, and if this seems to us a sad story it is merely that we are appalled by it, and not because Machen has said, “See how wretched were my days, how lonely my nights!”

Why then had Machen come to London, again and again? Why had this shy and retiring scribbler left the orchards and fields of Gwent, the pleasant rectory in Caerleon, to live in the great stone city on the Thames? Perhaps it was because his Welsh blood stirred within him and drove him to see the White Tower under which, centuries ago, they had buried the head of Bran, facing to the sea to guard against invasion. Perhaps it was to see the city that had been a city even before the legions came, the city fortified by King Llud, brother to Caesar’s great opponent, Cassibelaunus, for whom the city was called Caer Llud and later Caer London and then Londinium and Londres by the foreigners; that king who was buried at the gates still called Ludgate in his honor. Or perhaps it was because in London one could walk into a book shop and ask for Swinburne’s _Songs Before Sunrise_ as casually as one might walk into the Hanbury Arms in Caerleon and ask for ale.

For London was first and always a fascinating city to Machen. It is apparent in every page of his books. This countryman who could never forget his beloved country, delighted in the twistings and turnings of the streets and roads that led through London and eventually emerged from straggling suburbs into open fields. He notes with pleasure the streets whose crossings and corners he knew in the ’eighties and ’nineties; he misses them when, thirty years later, they have been absorbed by some great block of buildings. He remembers the facades, if such edifices could be dignified by the term, of the raw, red-brick villas that were then springing up all about London. He remembers the restaurants and even the menus, the taverns and the dwellings in the older sections of London, and the queer individuals and even queerer incidents he encountered over several decades.

London was for many years (and perhaps it still is) a city in which anything might happen. Strange encounters, mysterious strangers—these seemed to abound in the backwaters and byways of London. The city became to Machen a sort of Stevensonian Bagdad-on-the-Thames ... and he found in its streets and lanes, its Inns and Courts, the materials that went into _The Three Impostors_, _The London Adventure_, _A Fragment of Life_ and many another story.

This was true of Machen, and it was true of other writers in that decade. Despite the great calm postulated by Waugh, and in spite of the tremendous vacuum in which Waugh and other eminent Victorians fondly believed England and the world existed, there were great things stirring ... and the stirring was mostly centered about London. Being neither pamphleteers nor journalists, the writers of that day did not boil and bubble nor forecast trouble as they might today. To be sure, there was considerable pother about the New Woman, and the New This and That. But for the most part they did not try to portray their times. The poets were quite unaware of the peasants and “bourgeoise” was merely an epithet to be tossed at an unsympathetic critic on one of the more conservative journals. Time-conscious they most certainly were, but they aimed only slightly this side eternity. The delicate decadents, the most prolific and the best publicized group of that time, scarcely bothered to mention the undercurrents, but their very activity, their prodigious outpourings, were one of the manifestations of the stirrings beneath the surface. Then too, there was but one Shaw for every score of sonnetteers, one Wells for every dozen dilettante novelists, one Machen for every daring dramatist of the moment.

The beginnings of social-conscience and the vanguard of scientific thought were there, obscured for the moment by the lurid vapors given off by the writers of the purple phrase. There was, in short, a renascence of wonder, not another revival of mediaevalism or of neo-Gothicism, but of the wonder of things that existed behind the veil and seethed beneath the surface.

This was reflected as much by the lack of reticence in literature as in the development of new kinds of fiction ... fiction looking to new horizons. Shaw had already begun to puncture the balloons of Victorian complacency, Wells was writing of things that might come, things beyond our time and beyond our world. Machen began to postulate the existence of things behind the veil of common appearances. If Wells looked forward, Machen looked backward. He created a past as strange and as fearful as the future on some Wellsian planet. He was interested in the strange sciences of yesterday as Wells was in the sciences of tomorrow. Machen had read the treatises on alchemy, occult sciences, hypnotism, spiritualism—and in all of these he found a grain of truth. Alchemy, especially, interested him. The search for the basic power of the universe, the power and the ability to transform metals ... he could not dismiss completely the possibility. Machen was no scientist but he had, like Wells, a vast respect for the potentialities of science, and a keen instinct regarding probabilities. These men, at least, were not bringing in “the mean objects of the roadside” and subjecting them to the cold stare of the microscope.

Certainly we cannot afford to overlook the development of the detective story by Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes was presented not as a member of the existing force of law and order but as a radical departure from it. Holmes substituted cerebration for mere procedure. There was then, in London in the nineties, a small band of adventurers ... men who ventured to hold new beliefs, who sought for adventure in social as well as scientific fields, who looked forward (or backward) for strange worlds to visit. Note how they title their tales—each chapter, each episode is captioned in the Stevensonian manner as “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” or “The Novel of the Black Seal.” They searched farther afield than Paris for their magic—to the South Seas, to India, to the very Poles themselves—even to America.

Whatever was new and strange was usable. About this time London began to hear tales of the Mormons, and of the band called the Destroying Angels. Stevenson had them in mind when he wrote _The Dynamiters_, Doyle used them for his _Study in Scarlet_, and Machen used them as the genesis of an episode of _The Three Impostors_.

Wonder was in the air—whether it was expressed by a minor poet in terms of languishing eroticism or by Sherlock Holmes in the cataloguing of endless varieties of cigar ash. Something was stirring and it stirred most vigorously in London. Behind the facade of London lurked who knew what marvels or horrors. Behind the faces of Londoners lurked who knew what good or evil? London was filled with groups and clubs in search of the unusual. There were suicide clubs, freak clubs, cults of the horrible, Hellfire clubs and many others. Man, wondering about his future and his world, wonders also about himself. The word psychology was used hardly at all, but men were becoming aware of their minds and its quirks. Who was there among a group, a club, who might not have been another Jekyll?

This, then, was London in the 90’s ... a city on the threshold of still another century. Machen could not have forgotten that it had been Caer Llud, that the Romans had been there, and before them the Cymry. The very stones might burst into bloom, the pavements might ripple and surge and become as soft under foot as turf, the fogs and vapors of its chimney pots might become clouds of fragrance as in an orchard, or of incense as in a great cathedral.

_Chapter Three_

THE WEAVER OF FANTASY

1

In 1890, although he had begun to write in the modern manner and had even “fluttered the dovecotes” and startled the readers of the _St. James Gazette_ with his stories, the Rabelaisian enthusiasm was still upon Machen. It had, it is true, abated somewhat of late, but when his translation of _Le Moyen de Parvenir_ came from the bindery, all brave in blue and cream and gilt lettering, Machen still felt the spell strongly enough to set out, finally, for Touraine.

Actually, he had already determined to leave London before _Fantastic Tales_ came out. He had been living in Soho Street in two rooms where took place the grim battle of the fleas. London seemed to pall and to pale after that and he arranged to take a cottage in the Chiltern Hills. He had already written some of the tales in his most famous manner; _The Shining Pyramid_, _The Iron Maid_ among them; the idea of _The Great God Pan_ had been born and the country seemed the place to allow it to mature. There were certain alterations and repairs to be made on the cottage and he decided to go to France in the interim. It seemed, one must suppose, the thing to do—when one has a handsome set of new volumes one has translated from the French.

Much has been said herein, and sometimes somewhat slightingly, of the amazing effect of La Belle France upon the literate Anglo-Saxon. It has been intimated that Paris has always been something of an occupational disease among writers and minor poets. And here is Machen, off to France, like any puerile poetaster upon the publication of his first “slender volume.” To those who feel some word of explanation is due, some apology for an opinion seemingly shattered, it will be noted that Machen went to the South of France, to the countryside—and not to the northern cities and carefully manicured meadows and pompadoured pleasure-grounds of the Bois.

Moreover, and this is important, Machen went to a land that never was. For when he arrived at last in the land of Rabelais, of Beroalde, of Balzac—he was greatly disappointed. “The fact was,” he says, “that I had taken for granted Dore’s wonderful illustrations.” He had supposed that the enchanted heights, the profound and somber valleys, the airy abysses of these amazing plates had reprinted, as faithfully at least as a Chamber of Commerce brochure, the veritable scenery of Touraine.

The actuality was, alas! pitifully inadequate. Nevertheless Machen did what all sensible tourists do when the lands of enchantment fail to live up to the four-color posters—he visited the local taverns. This has always seemed to offer consolation and compensation in such cases. At any rate, the “Faisan d’Or” and “Le Caveau de Rabelais” provided noteworthy compensation for Dore. It took Machen a few days to get over his disappointment—but it was not too long before he could sit at his little table in the courtyard at the Faisan and say to himself, “This night I have had as much good red wine as ever I could drink.” And this was one of the great moments of his visit to Touraine. It encouraged him, moreover, and despite his disappointment over Dore, to return to Touraine every summer for the next ten years or so.

The landscape of Touraine and the vintages of the Vouvray pleased Machen, as Paris pleased the poetasters and absinthe appealed (in theory at least) to the young men who burned with a “hard gem-like flame” and who wore their passions and their shoes to tatters in their feverish quest for _la vie_. He discovered that there are, here and there, gardens that address the heart and spirit and not the florist—as Poe well knew.